The Most Important Part of Building a Minisite

by Patrick Toerner on November 6, 2010

Picking the right keyword

If you skip this article, then good luck. This is really the only step that matters. I have spent the past year and a half making mini sites and finally when i got serious about this step did i start seeing results. So here we go. First off, go download this: Domain Samurai. Its basically Google keyword tool with a bunch of extras. If you really are opposed to giving them your email address you can use Google’s keyword tool.

Our Goal: Pick a keyword with tons of traffic and almost no competition.

Our goal is easier said than done, but not impossible. Now start typing stuff into domain samurai to find this. Not much better advice from me than that. Type in everything you are interested to know about or wish you could find. I just typed in some random crap. The bigger the list of random stuff you are typing in the better. It doesn’t have to be random either, it could be products, but the you are competing against amazon, and that can get tough. Buy anyways, here is my list:

Pick the keywords with over 150(daily) traffic for the number one ranking website. Or about .4 times the total traffic. So for me that’s nose hair remover, solar garden lamps, mail order brides, how to get a girlfriend, tosh.0, boobies, and Halo Reach.

Cut the high competition keywords.

So now you go to Google and search the term. Check the page rank and backlinks of the pages that come up. A handy tool for this is SEO Quake. It shows you all that good stuff. So as a general rule, if the page ranks of all the top 10 combined is more than 20, forget about it. If you see that most of the pages are PR 0-2 with not very many links, or that the search doesn’t actually give you good results, then you have a winner.

Going back to my example, I can tell that Halo Reach, boobies, tosh.0, how to get a girlfriend, and mail order brides are going to be too competitive. And I took at look at the other two and they turned out to be too competitive too. Bummer. In reality these niches could be taken over, but it would take a lot of hard link building and content creation work. That’s fine if you love the niche, but I don’t have much interest in nose hair removers or solar garden lamps.

So it was a miss this time around, but if you do a couple hundred you will end up with 3 or 4 good keywords to pick from.

Things to remember:

If Amazon is number one and/or the page has a bunch of links, good luck. Google loves Amazon.

If Wikipedia is number one, you can beat them as long as the page doesn’t have a ton of links. In fact if Wikipedia is number one it often means that the niche isn’t competitive.

Your keyword does not have to be a product to make money from the site.

This is the most important part! If you spend 40 hours on keyword research you will save yourself 1000 hours down the line and make way more money.

Try to pick keywords that will soon be popular. That means that there is little competition now, but by the time the keyword is popular you are already on the first page. Examples: an upcoming event in the distant future, an unreleased book, or even the next Susan Boyle.

Anyways, that’s the nitty gritty. It may not be the best method, but I’m raking in money every day because I use this exact method. Next I will be talking about how to build your site and what not.